Many motor-vehicle owners face the problem to find their vehicle some time after having parked the vehicle. Above all, this is a problem when the vehicle has not been parked at its xe2x80x9cfavoritexe2x80x9d parking placexe2x80x94i.e., primarily on the occasion of shopping and leisure rides or when visiting unknown cities.
The most simple solution of this problemxe2x80x94apart from the driver practicing an intensive memorizing trainingxe2x80x94is that the driver notes the position of his vehicle onto a piece of paper. Just as simple, he could speak the vehicle""s position into a voice recorder like a dictating machine. Such systems with a small but for this purpose certainly sufficient memory capacity are meanwhile offered as key-ring tag. Both solutions will usually fail because of the vehicle owner""s laziness or his conviction not to need such a help to find his car later onxe2x80x94a conviction that is very often refuted by reality.
Furthermore, there are many methods and devices known that have the purpose to find stolen vehicles or to locate vehicles involved in an accident or to determine the position of a vehicle which is member of a vehicle fleet (e.g., the car fleet of a transport or moving company). Such examples can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 4,908,629, German Patent Application No. DE 196 08 777 A1, German Patent Application No. DE 44 03 873 A1 and German registered utility model No. DE 297 13 978 U1. These methods are mainly based on radio location. Then the vehicle, the position of which is to be determined, has a transmitter aboard, that can be localized with the aid of satellites or mobile or immobile localization receivers. Often, the transmitter is only activated by a radio signal emitted from a control center or by a special event (triggering the air bag at an accident, triggering the alarm signal of a theft protection system, etc.). Theoretically, systems like these could also be employed to find a parked vehicle, but these systems are based on the condition, that the vehicle to be localized can be reached by radio waves. This condition will usually be met by a vehicle moving around in the open countryxe2x80x94and if not instantly, the condition will be met a few minutes later. On the other hand, a parked vehicle can be positioned at any location, even at a very unfavorable one, and it will not leave such an unfavorable location. Already at the edge of a narrow street with high sideward buildings, as it is quite common in city centers, the (visual) communication to a satellite will be difficult or even impossible. Especially in town centers and in mountainous regions, there are a lot of radio shadows, where a communication with a vehicle cannot be established. Finally, a vehicle can have been parked in a parking garage. However, reinforced concrete structures act as Faraday cages, so that electromagnetic waves are reliably shielded. This applies even more for underground parking lots.
Apart from these technical differences with respect to searching a stolen vehicle, additionally, there is an important economic difference: a stolen car has a considerable value and a vehicle theft is a relatively seldom event. Thus, the expenditure required to find the car might be quite high. This justifies the high expenditure of mobile radio location groups. Of course, such a high expenditure cannot be accepted for the quite common task of finding a parked vehicle.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a simple and inexpensive tool to tell the driver the position of a vehicle having been parked at any (even at an unfavorable) location at any time, so that the driver can find his vehicle as fast as possible.
The above object is inventively achieved by a device as claimed.
The fundamental idea of the invention is: at the latest when a parking process occurs the information about the actual position and/or the route that has been traveled is recorded and stored, so that the driver later on can easily retrieve the stored information, when he looks for his vehicle. In this way, a temporal decoupling between the storage of the position information or the route information, respectively, and the later information access by the driver is achieved. Thus, when retrieving the information, it does not matter whether or not radio communication with the vehicle is possible. The information transmission from vehicle to an intermediate storage occurs at any case at a point of time, when the driver is in the direct vicinity of the vehicle, so that an undistorted information transmission is possible.
A further important advantage of the inventive device is that the device automatically (and unperceived by the driver) records the position of the parked vehicle, so that neither the driver""s comfort is reduced nor a recording is omitted due to driver overconfidence.
An additional advantage of the inventive device is that it can easily (at least partly) be integrated into electronic devices that the driver carries along with himself anyway, such as mobile phones, paging receivers, electronic organizers or mobile computers.
Further embodiments and modifications of the invention and their advantages are described in the dependent claims and the further description, respectively.